The introduction of the electronic health record in recent years provided opportunities to improve access to health care information and coordination of care. However, the resulting increase in digital documentation requirements placed additional administrative burden on clinicians. This led St. Luke’s Health System to search for ways to help alleviate documentation and cognitive load for clinicians, while recapturing patient face time and enhancing the care delivery experience.
St. Luke’s aimed to address these issues through EHR customization, introducing pop-ups and templates designed to simplify documentation. Recognizing the need for a more transformative approach, St. Luke’s turned to ambient AI as the next step in alleviating clinician administrative burden. The health system sought a development partner who could develop a solution tailored to its multi-specialty organization and seamlessly integrate with Epic. Goals for the collaboration included reduced documentation time for clinicians, enhanced workflow integration without care delivery disruption and improved patient experience.
St. Luke’s partnered with Ambience to deploy AI solutions tailored to each medical specialty, with integrated point-of-care coding and compliance features. This comprehensive approach ensures that the platform not only addresses the distinct documentation needs and workflow patterns of each specialty, but also delivers accurate coding and maintains compliance standards in real-time, streamlining the entire documentation process with a comprehensive integration with Epic EHR.
Together, St. Luke’s and Ambience launched a pilot program across 11 specialties, including particularly complex specialties such as pediatric hematology oncology and neurosurgery. The pilot rigorously tested the technology’s ability to meet the diverse needs of St. Luke’s clinicians. The results were significant: Clinicians reported a 38.8% decrease in documentation time and a 40.2% decrease in documentation time outside working hours. Additionally, patient face time increased by 22.8% due to clinician availability to focus more on interpersonal interactions and less on administrative burdens.
St. Luke’s, in collaboration with Ambience, streamlined operational efficiency and took meaningful steps toward enhancing the human connection at the heart of patient care. Supported by this new, tailored technology, St. Luke’s clinicians are able to focus more on patients and carry out the health system’s mission of improving the health of the people in the communities it serves.
